


Candle, Leaf, Memory

by MistressKat



Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: All Hallows, Drabble Sequence, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Lewis Fright Fest 2015, Melancholy, Memories, Multi, Pre-Poly if you prefer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2015-11-01
Packaged: 2018-04-29 10:51:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5124779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MistressKat/pseuds/MistressKat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Time to remember the dead. And the living.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Candle, Leaf, Memory

**Author's Note:**

> Written last minute for the Lewis Fright Fest 2015 over at [lewis_challenge.](http://lewis-challenge.livejournal.com/)

**Candle**  
  
A sharp scratch, brief smell of sulphur and the wick catches light. Laura shakes the match, watching as the candle flame flickers and dances before settling for steady burn. She’s always lit one, likes their company throughout the dark season, but on this day especially. All Hallows, time to remember the dead, to remember what she chooses to forget for the rest of the year; faces, names, _lives_ lived and left behind too soon. She couldn’t do her job if she’d let them crowd her mind and heart constantly, but this one day… Yes, she owes them that. Herself too.  
  
  
  
**Leaf**  
  
The trees are like burnished gold, aflame with the setting sun which paints the houses and towers in delicate rose. James tilts his head back, feeling the burn of waning light against his closed eyelids, the air turning brittle as it pierces his chest. Autumn delivers a message of loss, of impermanence; a reminder of a lesson he learned young and never forgot. Slowly, James walks across the park, heading nowhere in particular but as unable to linger as the summer. He thinks about leaving. He thinks about staying. Around him the night falls with the soft inevitability of death.  
  
  
  
**Memory**  
  
It shouldn’t bother him so, this day. It’s not like he’s religious, not by the new sense of the word as measured with saints and sins, nor by the old, tied to earth below, to the sky beyond. Robbie is not tethered by any of that. It’s a web of memories that holds him fast tonight, that tangles his thoughts as past and present blur into one sweet ache of loss, until he cannot move for the ghosts around him, until he doesn’t want to.  
  
These are dark waters he’s drowning in, and all the things that usually guide him to the shore seem distant and unreachable right now, caught in the web of might-have-beens.  
  
A loud knock snaps him out it, breath releasing in a long shuddery exhale as Robbie gets up to open the door. He is surprised and then immediately ashamed of his surprise, stepping back to let James and Laura into the house.  
  
“Emoting in the dark, sir?” James asks, voice dry as he flicks the light on but the squeeze he gives Robbie’s shoulder is warm and lingering.  
  
“Low blood-sugar,” Laura diagnoses, rising on tiptoe to brush a kiss on Robbie’s cheek before she bustles to the kitchen with take-away bags.  
  
“Come on then,” James says, nudging Robbie in the same direction. “I believe the doctor is prescribing Tikka Masala for that.”  
  
Robbie grins and lets himself be pulled toward the warmth of food and friendship, toward the light of new memories in the making.  
  



End file.
